Stars align for Apple at the holidays

Apple Inc's iPad and bustling retail business have encouraged investors to shrug off the shaky economy and snap up the company's shares as 2010 comes to a close.

Checks by analysts over the past few weeks indicate strong demand for a number of Apple products, which has pushed its shares up as much as 9 percent over the past month.

Wall Street expects the company to post revenue of more than $24 billion in the December quarter, up 50 percent from last year. That would leave Apple trailing only Hewlett-Packard and IBM in sales among U.S. technology companies.

Image:Ben Clark, 10, learns to play Silent Night on an iPad using the Magic Fiddle app, during a holiday youth workshop at the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif.